TORONTO – Rogers Cable must be juiced about its next new TV channel because ads touting it are already in rotation among its parent company’s Toronto radio stations, despite the fact it doesn’t launch for another 12 days.
The channel is RETV, a brand new digital real estate channel platform for cable operators, from Capital Networks. Officially, Rogers will launch it on July 19th in York Region, with the rest of the company’s Ontario systems adding it later this year.
Customers of Aurora Cable already know RETV since the company has been offering the service to its 14,000 customers for three years now.
On the surface, RETV (Rogers Digital Cable 260) appears simply as a better, more attractive real estate channel. But it’s deeper than that. The service is meant to be a converged multi-device local service for cable operators because it shows homes on TV, the web and wireless (phones or PDAs).
Once a house for sale goes live on TV, it can also immediately be seen on the web and on the wireless handheld.
Agents, who must sign up as members with Rogers for a fee which will vary depending on the region, self-post new sale listings. This removes what was an onerous cost of the old analog cable real estate channels which were once widely popular among Canadian cable operators. The agent submits photos and written description, which is forwarded to Capital Networks. It loads that into the RETV system and sends the description to a voice-over announcer, who e-mails back the audio file. That is matched with the home and loaded into the system for airing on TV and the web.
All the cable operator must do is sell memberships – and ads on the channel.
With RETV, agents can post as many homes as they want in a year for an annual fee, making it far cheaper than buying individual newspaper ads, which charge by the insertion. Capital Networks is promising that any new listing posted to the system by 11 a.m. on a weekday will be on TV, the web and wireless, with a professional voice-over, by 5 p.m. that day, at the latest.
“We guarantee same business day service to them,” says Capital Networks president Bil Trainor. “If they have the information in by 11 a.m., the home will be on all three media with a professional voice-over by 5 p.m. That changes things… it’s light years ahead of the newspaper process.”
No need for a photo and tiny write-up to be in days in advance of the local paper’s homes edition.
The on-air content always changes, as well. It’s not locked in like the old linear, analog real estate channel. At the top of every hour will be a “Hot House”, which is basically the most recent home added to the rotation, meaning that viewers will continue to see new content as they visit the channel.
The consistent updating, overall design and professional audio pulls viewers to the channel, who can then also be reached with ads sold by Rogers to local movers, insurance agents, renovators, mortgage companies and so on.
Part of Capital Networks’ heritage was providing real estate channels to cable companies, back in the analog days. Home shoppers liked those channels and watched them – and cable made some money from them. However, growing lists of specialty channels, combined with Canadian regulations and the fact that MSOs didn’t make a lot of money from the old real estate channels meant that those channels had disappeared in recent years.
“RETV is a software platform that lowers the cost dramatically,” says Trainor. “Most (MSOs) got out of the real estate business because they weren’t making a lot of money at it.”
The Aurora agents love the RETV system. “Sixty-five to 75% of all local listings in that market are available (on RETV) in any given time,” said Trainor. “All of the leading agents in the Aurora market (are RETV members).”
Its reputation in Aurora has meant that Rogers is already signing up new agent members – even though they have yet to actually see how the system works.
For now, the photos of the homes are still static images but Trainor says the company will add more production elements soon and as MPEG-4 video grows, perhaps items such as virtual tour videos.
The additional attraction for cable, of course, is that this is a local thing that satellite can’t really do.
